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Okay, a couple more random B5 comments
This is about Marcus.
So I remember talking in my liveblog watchalong posts about how much trouble I had warming up to him, but I can't really get over how much more I like him while rewatching episodes. He brings a wildcard element to the show that is really interesting - he's just not quite like any of the other characters, and I had trouble with that the first time around.
But now that I'm, I guess, aware of it, I enjoy his interactions with the other characters and how he's one of the things about the show (along with the ongoing threads of prophesy, the afterlife bits, etc) that gives it a bit of a fantasy-in-space vibe. I especially like his episodes with G'Kar and with Stephen, and I wish we'd ever really gotten a follow-up to the G'Kar and Marcus episode in early season 4; from what I can remember, I don't even think they talk again - they're completely off in different parts of the storyline.
I also like that Ivanova is as broken up about his death as if they'd had a thing even though they didn't. I don't think she really reciprocated the way he felt; I think it was always one-sided and it's just friendship on her end, but it's still a profound enough grief to send her into an emotional tailspin. I'm sure the fact that he died for her is part of that, but it also feels like, from her end, it was a platonic warrior bond that developed over time even though she didn't really want anything to do with him in the beginning. And then he's suddenly gone and she's reeling from that. (Obviously one can ship it, or write get-together fixits, as people do! But I like that her reaction is as profound as it is even though as far as I can tell it's based on friendship feelings and not a romantic interest.)
So I remember talking in my liveblog watchalong posts about how much trouble I had warming up to him, but I can't really get over how much more I like him while rewatching episodes. He brings a wildcard element to the show that is really interesting - he's just not quite like any of the other characters, and I had trouble with that the first time around.
But now that I'm, I guess, aware of it, I enjoy his interactions with the other characters and how he's one of the things about the show (along with the ongoing threads of prophesy, the afterlife bits, etc) that gives it a bit of a fantasy-in-space vibe. I especially like his episodes with G'Kar and with Stephen, and I wish we'd ever really gotten a follow-up to the G'Kar and Marcus episode in early season 4; from what I can remember, I don't even think they talk again - they're completely off in different parts of the storyline.
I also like that Ivanova is as broken up about his death as if they'd had a thing even though they didn't. I don't think she really reciprocated the way he felt; I think it was always one-sided and it's just friendship on her end, but it's still a profound enough grief to send her into an emotional tailspin. I'm sure the fact that he died for her is part of that, but it also feels like, from her end, it was a platonic warrior bond that developed over time even though she didn't really want anything to do with him in the beginning. And then he's suddenly gone and she's reeling from that. (Obviously one can ship it, or write get-together fixits, as people do! But I like that her reaction is as profound as it is even though as far as I can tell it's based on friendship feelings and not a romantic interest.)
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I do not ship them and it matters very much to me that she's completely messed up by his death, not just that she chose her own and then he substituted himself without giving her a say in it, but the fact that he's dead and she's lost someone else and they are never going to sort out that weird chivalric battle couple vibe which almost certainly would never have turned into a romance even if she had just boffed him once (although with that kind of emotional differential, maybe just as well she never did) and of course she mourns him. Despite its load-bearing love stories, Babylon 5 as a show is really good at the ways that people connect that don't have to involve conventional or otherwise romance.
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Yes! It's not even cynical. People in the B5 universe sleep with one another for all the reasons people sleep with one another in this one, including strategically, out of affection, out of ennui, and for the fun of it. It's very non-judgmental. It also feels much more real than any number of common television alternatives.
(The station's sexual and reproductive health services must be generally solid because it is also quite clear that most species will try it on with most other species; unless everyone has space PrEP or something, I absolutely do not envy Franklin that part of his job.)
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Yes! I love that. And in addition to that, the sexual behavior that we see for at least some of the alien species (that we know anything about) is cultural and individual as much as biological. I don't recall if this actually made it into show canon, but there's something in the supplemental canon about Narns, as a society, being monogamous and mating for life, but G'Kar is very obviously not like that. Similarly, the Centauri are polygamous as a culture, but we see monogamous couples too, even though they're bucking the trend of the society overall. Which of course makes it very easy to assume the existence of asexual Centauri, or gay Narns - why wouldn't there be?
(Random tidbit from the book: one of JMS's early directives was that crowd scenes in Babylon 5's should include at least one same-sex couple in the background. The crowd scenes are frequent too chaotic to pick out anyone doing anything specific, but I like knowing that!)
(The station's sexual and reproductive health services must be generally solid because it is also quite clear that most species will try it on with most other species; unless everyone has space PrEP or something, I absolutely do not envy Franklin that part of his job.)
Ahahaha. And that, too, seems like plausible behavior. (Isn't there an early episode in which one of the characters, maybe Garibaldi, interrupts what is clearly a human chatting up an alien to inform him that this species eats their mates and maybe he should try somewhere else? I seem to recall that that scene also implied the existence of "safe sex with aliens" pamphlets.)
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Yes! I was in the process of editing my previous comment to add that the normalization of queerness in this future actually seems part and parcel of the same attitude: whatever the limits of American broadcast standards and practices, you can tell that people's individual lives are all kinds of fluid and diverse even if we don't see them. I feel it should contribute to the shippability of the show, but the deciding factor there may just be the human inclination to make characters smash.
I don't recall if this actually made it into show canon, but there's something in the supplemental canon about Narns, as a society, being monogamous and mating for life, but G'Kar is very obviously not like that.
(Counterpoint: Londo.)
(Random tidbit from the book: one of JMS's early directives was that crowd scenes in Babylon 5's should include at least one same-sex couple in the background. The crowd scenes are frequent too chaotic to pick out anyone doing anything specific, but I like knowing that!)
Same. Now I want to rewatch some crowd scenes.
(Isn't there an early episode in which one of the characters, maybe Garibaldi, interrupts what is clearly a human chatting up an alien to inform him that this species eats their mates and maybe he should try somewhere else? I seem to recall that that scene also implied the existence of "safe sex with aliens" pamphlets.)
There is! I can't remember which episode, but I agree with you that it's Garibaldi who has to intervene and that he does it with the air of a man who has had this conversation before and would really be fine never having it again.
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Oops, sorry for the short-circuit, I know that can be frustrating when DW's comments lock!
to add that the normalization of queerness in this future actually seems part and parcel of the same attitude: whatever the limits of American broadcast standards and practices, you can tell that people's individual lives are all kinds of fluid and diverse even if we don't see them.
Yes! I love that even though the show and its creator were operating within the limits they had to work with (the TV medium at the time, also the cultural milieu of someone who grew up in the 60s/70s) the show does still sell the future very strongly as a diverse place - sexually, religiously, and otherwise. I like that we see people in the background wearing different kinds of cultural dress and not just Future Space Fashions. I like that we get more religious diversity than I'm used to seeing in future space shows. It's a future full of People Like Us and I think the show
(Counterpoint: Londo.)
I accept your counterpoint! But he'll never stop flirting ...
(Londo is also an interesting example of the individuality of sexual preference; he's a person from a culture with normalized plural marriage who seems to be wired to fall very hard for one person at a time.)
I can't remember which episode, but I agree with you that it's Garibaldi who has to intervene and that he does it with the air of a man who has had this conversation before and would really be fine never having it again.
Yeah, I love how that sense of world-weary "another of THOSE IDIOTS" comes across there. I should try to find that scene again. (And also rewatch some crowd scenes.)
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I don't begrudge it! Queerness still got into the conversation.
It's a future full of People Like Us and I think the show
I may conversely have short-circuited where this sentence was leading, though, and would like to find out.
I accept your counterpoint! But he'll never stop flirting ...
"It's animal magnetism. What can I say?"
(Londo is also an interesting example of the individuality of sexual preference; he's a person from a culture with normalized plural marriage who seems to be wired to fall very hard for one person at a time.)
Also agreed! Returning to a running conversation from last spring, it feels like another of the places where Londo fascinatingly does not fit the societal model that he's done such a hard job of trying to enforce on himself. We don't hear the real version until Season 5, but the story of his first wife makes painful sense: back in Season 3, he treated Vir's dismay at the news of his arranged marriage as the equivalent of stag night jitters, a politically and sexually advantageous fait accompli which only a fool would try to get out of; and when he was as young and even more of a fool, he married for love and then blew it, buckled under his family's threat of disinheritance and got the divorce they wanted and all these years later still thinks of his actions with disgust and the dancer as the only one of his wives he truly loved. If he had been able to treat his own arranged marriages so transactionally, or at least more pragmatically, his relationship with Timov might not have been D.O.A. She gives the impression that it was equally loveless from her side, but if they were a pair of bad bets stuck together, they might at least have been able to be friends over it. But as far as I can infer from canon, he resented the arrangement so much that he couldn't make the effort and once again, Londo, is there any aspect of your life that you did not make harder on yourself? In hindsight, the speech he gives Vir about birds that try to leave the nest and fall flat on their beaks is all too believable as an echo of something he heard the first time he tried to be his own person and by Centauri aristocratic standards was just an embarrassment. (I'm sorry, apparently I have bottomless opinions on the subject of Londo Mollari and canon's been closed for decades.)
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Uh, woops! I seem to have lost that thread completely, and I don't remember what the rest of the sentence was. I assume it was going to be something positive about the show selling what it was trying to sell? I GUESS.
when he was as young and even more of a fool, he married for love and then blew it, buckled under his family's threat of disinheritance and got the divorce they wanted and all these years later still thinks of his actions with disgust and the dancer as the only one of his wives he truly loved.
Yes, and one thing I really cannot get over is that this is all there in early season one, we don't get the actual story until season five, and the show itself never connects the dots explicitly; it just lets the viewer do that. Londo's frustrated anger at the naivety of the young lovers, who are trying to capture what he himself let slip away; the speech about forgetting how to dance, and how he switches after that to helping them, the way no one helped him. The romance with Adira, in which she is a do-over of sorts, and he's going to make the right decision this time -- except that a husband isn't what she needs just then, freedom is what she needs. In some sense that we're not even aware of at the time, all of this (a second round of failure that calls up the first and perhaps most lastingly tragic failure of his life) probably even helps set him up to be a soft target for Morden later. He has nothing left to lose.
If he had been able to treat his own arranged marriages so transactionally, or at least more pragmatically, his relationship with Timov might not have been D.O.A. She gives the impression that it was equally loveless from her side, but if they were a pair of bad bets stuck together, they might at least have been able to be friends over it. But as far as I can infer from canon, he resented the arrangement so much that he couldn't make the effort and once again, Londo, is there any aspect of your life that you did not make harder on yourself?
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that before but you're right - a Londo who was willing to simply be a cold, amoral social climber (presumably the husband Timov wanted, and thought she was getting) would probably have gotten along fine with her. But as always, what should have been the best parts of him (the yearning for trust and love and something better than the hand life dealt him; the part of him that doesn't just want amoral companionship, but to be genuinely cared about) ends up tripping him up as usual.
(I'm sorry, apparently I have bottomless opinions on the subject of Londo Mollari and canon's been closed for decades.)
Don't apologize! I apparently am nowhere near running out of opinions myself! I'm having the time of my life talking about this show.
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(Londo is also an interesting example of the individuality of sexual preference; he's a person from a culture with normalized plural marriage who seems to be wired to fall very hard for one person at a time.)
I loved that in the show
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I understand why she thinks she should have slept with him, but I also think that would have been a mistake, given that he was in love and she absolutely wasn't.
And I do think that the Byron storyline would have made much more sense with an Ivanova still reeling a bit from not having said yes to Marcus; Pat Tallman does a decent job, but I'm sorry we didn't get to see that version!
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Yeah, I think that the show handled her feelings around his death very well. It's complicated! And her feelings about it are going to be complicated! The show has its faults but I never feel like it punishes its female characters for their sexual behavior, from Ivanova's lack of feelings to Adira being a sex worker.
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